The content of political doctrines and dominant lines of practical politics is legitimised by the ef- fort to implement the ideal of a good, free society by applying the idea of reason. At the same ...time, its performance not only defines the conditions for the theoretical justification of the idea of power, but also becomes a tool for its implementation. The primary goal of this paper is in an endeavour to place the normative nature of current (democratic) political regimes where we encounter the need for a more fundamental theoretical argument that would enable us to respond to their dynamic, often contradictory development. One of the consequences of such fixation is in the division of sciences into the realms of nature and society, the independence of their methodological orientation, or the factual and theoretical division of human reality into rationalism (means, technology, efficiency) and human values and mean- ings which become the domain of irrationalism. Therefore, from the perspective of modern political systems, irrationally conditioned modelling of reality under the guise of rationality may be considered an important aspect of the ideological compromise between politics, economics, and the media sphere on the lasting continuity of prosperity for the rich ones.
The European Union has opened the way towards a new form of citizenship founded on two promises: one “federal,” the other “cosmopolitan.” However, the condition of asylum‐seekers and the attacks on ...the rule of law have, over the past ten years, undermined this dual ambition of the European Union at the risk of ruining both its cosmopolitan and federal dimensions. In this particular context, political theory has a role to play in elucidating the concepts at stake, such as that of “illiberal democracy,” which is now being mobilized in Europe to mask a gradual liquidation of democracy.
Since the publication of Ekins’s The Nature of Legislative Intent, significant attention has been paid to common attitude models of legislative intention, that is, models that require unanimity among ...its group members. A common interpretation of Ekins is that these common attitudes are to be preferred over aggregated attitudes. I argue that any feasible theory of legislative attitudes will require nontrivial aggregation (i.e., not based on unanimity rules alone). Two arguments are put forward in this regard: first, that nontrivial aggregation better explains uncooperative legislative behaviour and, second, that mathematical problems with aggregation apply to common attitudes as well, since they involve trivial aggregation. These arguments generalise to theories of common attitudes other than Ekins’s.
The Play of International Practice Bueger, Christian; Gadinger, Frank
International studies quarterly,
09/2015, Volume:
59, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The core claims of the practice turn in International Relations (IR) remain ambiguous. What promises does international practice theory hold for the field? How does the kind of theorizing it produces ...differ from existing perspectives? What kind of research agenda does it produce? This article addresses these questions. Drawing on the work of Andreas Reckwitz, we show that practice approaches entail a distinctive view on the drivers of social relations. Practice theories argue against individualistic-interest and norm-based actor models. They situate knowledge in practice rather than "mental frames" or "discourse." Practice approaches focus on how groups perform their practical activities in world politics to renew and reproduce social order. They therefore overcome familiar dualisms—agents and structures, subjects and objects, and ideational and material—that plague IR theory. Practice theories are a heterogeneous family, but, as we argue, share a range of core commitments. Realizing the promise of the practice turn requires considering the full spectrum of its approaches. However, the field primarily draws on trajectories in international practice theory that emphasize reproduction and hierarchies. It should pay greater attention to practice approaches rooted in pragmatism and that emphasize contingency and change. We conclude with an outline of core challenges that the future agenda of international practice theory must tackle.
This article explains the nature and constitutional role of norms and explores ways to respond to the challenges they face, which threaten the viability of democracy. Constitutional norms are ...informal unwritten rules embedded in the normative practices of officials and political leaders. The effect of departures from constitutional norms depends on the seriousness with which participants take responsibility for their practice. The article distinguishes norm infringers, who depart from norms but do not intentionally challenge them; norm entrepreneurs, who challenge the norm in hopes of reforming or replacing it; and norm saboteurs, who seek to deal a deathblow to the norm or the constitutional system of which it is a part. Responses appropriate to each kind of deviation are considered.
The theme of this special issue is the necessity of a cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory. The question at the heart of this introductory chapter takes the challenge of ‘methodological ...cosmopolitanism’, already addressed in a Special Issue on Cosmopolitan Sociology in this journal (Beck and Sznaider 2006), an important step further: How can social and political theory be opened up, theoretically as well as methodologically and normatively, to a historically new, entangled Modernity which threatens its own foundations? How can it account for the fundamental fragility, the mutability of societal dynamics (of unintended side‐effects, domination and power), shaped by the globalization of capital and risks at the beginning of the twenty‐first century? What theoretical and methodological problems arise and how can they be addressed in empirical research? In the following, we will develop this ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in four steps: firstly, we present the major conceptual tools for a theory of cosmopolitan modernities; secondly, we de‐construct Western modernity by using examples taken from research on individualization and risk; thirdly, we address the key problem of methodological cosmopolitanism, namely the problem of defining the appropriate unit of analysis; and finally, we discuss normative questions, perspectives, and dilemmas of a theory of cosmopolitan modernities, in particular problems of political agency and prospects of political realization.
As a key feature of the contemporary political landscape, populism stands as one of the most contentious concepts in political science. This article presents a critique of dominant conceptions of ...populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a new compelling way of thinking about the phenomenon. We argue that this new category captures an important dimension of contemporary populism that is missed by rival approaches. In doing so, we put forward an inductive model of populism as a political style and contextualise it within the increasingly stylised and mediatised milieu of contemporary politics by focusing on its performative features. We conclude by considering how this concept allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, how it translates into the political mainstream and its implications for democratic politics.
As William Cavanaugh has remarked, the scholarly notion of religion “should often be surrounded by scare quotes. Its flexibility and occasional nebulousness make evaluating its role in conceiving of, ...effecting, and justifying violence even more difficult. At the same time, it sticks around and remains a vital category of contemporary analysis. What if getting behind the Wars of Religion—the period to which Cavanaugh traces the emergence of his “myth of religious violence”—could plant the seeds for a new paradigm in understanding the relationship between religion and violence? In this article, I analyze the Chronicon of Jean Hocsem, a fourteenth-century canon from Liège. Untranslated into English and rarely written about, Hocsem’s text offers an unexpectedly political perspective on this question. Combining insights from Augustine’s City of God as well as Aristotle’s Politics and basing his ideas on his own experience of nearly constant conflict, Hocsem develops the idea that class antagonisms and human frailty make violence—especially political violence—inevitable. He takes this approach within a polity ruled by a prince-bishop, though one he would not have thought of as “religious”. Hocsem’s solutions are thus avowedly political. His pessimism about such questions leads to an emphasis on mitigating violence through the institution of proper socio-political structures. This reading of Hocsem and his politicizing of the question of violence opens new possibilities for scholars, further calling into question any easy relationship between the modern categories of “religion” and violence.
As political theorists address the parochial foundations of their field, engagement with the Indigenous traditions of Turtle Island (North America) is overdue. This article argues that theorists ...should approach such engagement with caution. Indigenous nations’ politics of knowledge production may differ from those of de-parochializing political theorists. Some Indigenous communities, in response to violent histories of knowledge extraction, have developed practices of refusal. The contemporary movement of resurgence engages Indigenous traditions of political thought toward the end of promoting Indigenous intellectual and political sovereignty and self-determination. These practices demonstrate a commitment to epistemic justice that is imperfectly aligned with, and potentially opposed to, inclusion-oriented projects like comparative political theory. If political theorists are to de-parochialize political theory by incorporating Indigenous traditions, they must do so in ways that are respectful of Indigenous peoples’ own struggles for epistemic justice. This can be achieved by drawing on and deepening practices of reflexivity exhibited in leading comparative political theory scholarship, and by allowing Indigenous treaty relationships to set the terms of the encounter.
In this article I set out to trace some of the implications of recharging the political potency of nature in more-than-human terms. This shifts attention from a biopolitical focus on the ...inventiveness of the life sciences and what this means in terms of the emergence of ‘cyborg’ political subjects to an onto-political focus on the inventiveness of knowledge controversies and what these mean for techno-political practices. Specifically, the article examines the onto-politics of ‘natural’ hazard events and their capacity to force thought in those affected by them, and so to place new demands on research practices in terms of rendering such events affective and amenable to political interrogation. I work these arguments through the demanding experimental ethos of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, for whom scientific practices produce reliable knowledge claims only in so far as the questions they address are at risk of being redefined by the phenomena mobilized in them, and who extends this ethos to elaborate an understanding of, even a test for, an adequate political theory and practice. I do so with reference to a recent research experiment in which I collaborated with social and natural scientists and people affected by flooding in the UK.
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